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Hitler joins the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis)
In 1919, army veteran Adolf Hitler, frustrated by Germany’s defeat in World War, which had left the nation economically depressed and politically unstable, joined a fledgling political organization called the German Workers’ Party. -
Mussolini forms the Fascist Party in Italy
Benito Mussolini, an Italian World War I veteran and publisher of Socialist newspapers, breaks with the Italian Socialists and establishes the nationalist Fasci di Combattimento, named after the Italian peasant revolutionaries, or Fighting Bands, from the 19th century. Commonly known as the Fascist Party, Mussolini’s new right-wing organization advocated Italian nationalism, had black shirts for uniforms, and launched a program of terrorism and intimidation against its leftist opponents. -
Treaty of Versailles is signed
Treaty of Versailles, peace document signed at the end of World War I by the Allied and associated powers and by Germany in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, France, on June 28, 1919. It went into effect on January 10, 1920. -
Washington Naval Conference
The Washington Arms Conference was a military conference convened by the Congress and President Warren G. Harding in 1921. This conference was the first international conference held in the U.S. and was attended by nine nations which included; Japan, China, United States, France, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Britain and Netherlands. The objective of this Conference was to reduce the naval arms race and to come up with security accords in Pacific area. -
Mussolini threatens to march on Rome
The insurrection by which Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in late October 1922. The March marked the beginning of fascist rule and meant the doom of the preceding parliamentary regimes of socialists and liberals. -
Hitler attempts to overthrow the Weimar government (Beer Hall Putsch)
Adolf Hitler and his followers staged the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, a failed takeover of the government in Bavaria, a state in southern Germany. -
Hitler goes to prison and writes Mein Kampf
Volume One of Adolf Hitler’s philosophical autobiography, Mein Kampf, is published. It was a blueprint of his agenda for a Third Reich and a clear exposition of the nightmare that will envelope Europe from 1939 to 1945. The book sold a total of 9,473 copies in its first year. -
Kellogg Briand Pact
The Kellogg Briand Pact is a 1928 international agreement in which signatory states promised not to use war to resolve. Parties failing to abide by this promise. It was signed by Germany, France, and the United States on 27 August 1928, and by most other states soon after. -
Japan occupies Manchuria, China
The Japanese invasion of Manchuria began on 19 September 1931, when the Kwantung Army of the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria immediately following the Mukden Incident. After the war, the Japanese established the puppet state of Manchukuo. -
Hitler places second in German national elections for president
The 2nd round run-off of the election was held on April 10, 1932. They were the second and final direct elections to the office of President of the Reich, Germany's head of state under the Weimar Republic. The incumbent President, Paul von Hindenburg, was re-elected to a second seven-year term of office. His major opponent in the election was Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party who place second. -
Germany withdraws from League of Nations
the German government announced its withdrawal from the League of Nations. The ostensible reason was the refusal of the Western powers to acquiesce in Germany’s demands for military parity. With this curt letter. -
Geneva Disarmament Conference
The Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments, also called the World Disarmament Conference or Geneva Disarmament Conference, was a failed effort by member states of the League of Nations, together with the United States, to actualize the ideology of disarmament. -
President von Hindenburg dies
German President Paul von Hindenburg dies. With the support of the German armed forces, Hitler becomes President of Germany. -
Hitler merges offices chancellor & president
Adolf Hitler, already chancellor, is also elected president of Germany in an unprecedented consolidation of power in the short history of the republic. -
Great Depression ends in Germany
Hitler's economy remained low in productivity, as there was little incentive, and some disincentives, to innovate the usual incentive for innovation being high profits, which in Germany were heavily taxed. But by 1935, Germany's farmers were prospering, and industrial production was above its 1929 level and rising rapidly. -
Mussolini invades Ethiopia
An armed conflict that resulted in Ethiopia’s subjection to Italian rule. Often seen as one of the episodes that prepared the way for World War II, the war demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations when League decisions were not supported by the great powers. -
Hitler militarizes the Rhineland
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler violates the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact by sending German military forces into the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone along the Rhine River in western Germany. -
Hitler signs alliance with Mussolini
Coalition formed in 1936 between Italy and Germany. An agreement informally linking the two fascist countries was reached on October 25, 1936. It was formalized by the Pact of Steel in 1939. The term Axis Powers came to include Japan as well. -
Japanese invasion of China
The Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. It began with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 in which a dispute between Japanese and Chinese troops escalated into a battle. -
Italy withdraws from League of Nations
Mussolini left the League of Nations in 1937 after the League had imposed economic sanctions on Italy for the invasion of Abyssinia. -
Hitler and Nazi Germany annex Austria
Hitler accompanied German troops into Austria, where enthusiastic crowds met them. Hitler appointed a new Nazi government, and on March 13 the Anschluss was proclaimed. Austria existed as a federal state of Germany until the end of World War II, when the Allied powers declared the Anschluss void and reestablished an independent Austria. -
Hitler and Nazi Germany gain Sudetenland
The German occupation of Czechoslovakia began with the German annexation of Czechoslovakia's border regions known collectively as the Sudetenland, under terms outlined by the Munich Agreement. German leader Adolf Hitler's pretext for this action was the alleged privations suffered by the ethnic German population living in those regions. New and extensive Czechoslovak border fortifications were also located in the same area. -
Hitler occupies Czechoslovakia
On 15 March 1939, the German Wehrmacht moved into the remainder of Czechoslovakia and, from Prague Castle, Hitler proclaimed Bohemia and Moravia the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The occupation ended with the surrender of Germany following World War II. -
Hitler and Stalin sign Non-Aggression Pact
On August 23, 1939, enemies Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union surprised the world by signing the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, in which the two countries agreed to take no military action against each other for the next 10 years. -
Germany invades Poland
German forces bombard Poland on land and from the air, as Adolf Hitler seeks to regain lost territory and ultimately rule Poland. World War II had begun. -
Britain and France declare war on Nazi Germany
In response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Britain and France, both allies of the overrun nation declare war on Germany. -
France surrenders and is occupied by nazi Germany
Petain arranged an armistice with the Nazis. The armistice, signed by the French on June 22, went into effect on June 25, and more than half of France was occupied by the Germans. -
Japan Italy and Germany sign the Tripartite Pact
The Axis powers are formed as Germany, Italy, and Japan become allies with the signing of the Tripartite Pact in Berlin. The Pact provided for mutual assistance should any of the signatories suffer attack by any nation not already involved in the war. This formalizing of the alliance was aimed directly at “neutral” America–designed to force the United States to think twice before venturing in on the side of the Allies.